AMD layoffs

[Vesku]

With Intel Pentium 4 "good PR" was giving out lots of cash for putting stickers on boxes and the like. AMD has never had that kind of warche$t. If they did then they would have used the money to build more Fabs during the A64 days.

 

[exar333]

With Intel Pentium 4 "good PR" was giving out lots of cash for putting stickers on boxes and the like. AMD has never had that kind of warche$t. If they did then they would have used the money to build more Fabs during the A64 days.

Think Intel 'jingle'. Ads on TV. The common man has no idea who AMD even is. Say the 'jingle' and joe-schmo can say 'Intel inside!'. Love it or not, its how it is.

 

[acx]

Think Intel 'jingle'. Ads on TV. The common man has no idea who AMD even is. Say the 'jingle' and joe-schmo can say 'Intel inside!'. Love it or not, its how it is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBxW22JLUmg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8d0I7J5e5k

Don't think AMD has the advertising dollars to put on such an ad campaign in Korea.

 

[primesuspect]

Hey everyone. Brian from Icrontic here. Just wanted to let you know we added a couple of names to the story we published yesterday. Craig Lakey and Hao Pham, both from FirePro marketing, are confirmed laid off.

Thanks!


We appreciate your efforts to contact the community directly but we do not allow self-promotion by way of direct links.

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We have the same requirements for people wanting to promote their blogs and so on, I hope you can understand. For now I have edited your post to remove the embedded link. The rest of your post's contents are fine as is.

Administrator Idontcare

 

[wlee15]

None-less Intel even after the release of their Core 2 processors decided to layoff 10% of their workforce that similarly was targeted at their marketing department.

 

[mosox]

Good PR is ESSENTIAL to any product. If you have the best of something, and no one knows about it, how are you going to make $$$?

Intel survived on excellent PR when their products struggled.

I wouldn't call what Intel did back then PR. More like Mafia-style blackmail and coercion.

 

[apoppin]

Hey everyone. Brian from Icrontic here. Just wanted to let you know we added a couple of names to the story we published yesterday. Craig Lakey and Hao Pham, both from FirePro marketing, are confirmed laid off.

Thanks!

It looks like most of graphics division PR is gone including Bernard and Antal who moved from Europe last year. Do you know about Evan? i haven't seen anything from him on twitter. What about the CPU guys?

i think it is a mistake to lay-off their PR and engineers. Better would have been to start with the senior board.

 

[drizek]

AMDs PR is just terrible.

Honestly, they would be better off saying absolutely nothing to the press and just selling everything in cardboard boxes with no graphics on them.

 

[Idontcare]

Fewer PR people in the world can only be a good thing in my world view. Not anyone I look to for information. If I ever feel the need for smoky farts maybe I'll look one of them up.

I do NOT want to be told how one goes about crafting a "smoky" fart...

 

[IlllI]

yeah AMd pr dept has been terribad since as far back as i can recall. this might actually be a good step for the company

 

[bryanW1995]

LOL, I had the exact sentence quoted for a response. That says it all.
Expecting to save 10 million in the next quarter alone from this move, translates to me, less people working on the next FX cpu.

Allegedly the cuts were focused in marketing rather than engineering. Their marketing dept definitely sucks right now, maybe I could view this as less of a bad thing if people like Carroll Killebrew hadn't gotten the ax as well.

 

[Idontcare]

Allegedly the cuts were focused in marketing rather than engineering. Their marketing dept definitely sucks right now, maybe I could view this as less of a bad thing if people like Carroll Killebrew hadn't gotten the ax as well.

You may recall AMD did the exact same thing after Phenom turned out to be Failnom. With bulldozer turning to out to be derpdozer, history repeats in so so so many ways.

Does anyone know if JFAMD survived the cuts?

 

[thilanliyan]

^Wasn't Killebrew on the GPU side though? Why fire people from the GPU side? Unless they were going to focus less on performance and more on mobile.

 

[cbn]

Does anyone know if JFAMD survived the cuts?

I sure hope he did!

(He was a great at explaining all sorts of technical matters to folks like me. For some reason, his explanation of running fabs "cold" and "hot" was something that always sticks out in my mind.)

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?p=29920178

Not necessarily sure on how much downclocking happens, it is very dependent on how you are running your fabs, what you are targeting, etc. combined with the overall market demand.

Let's say that you need to satisfy demand for a lot of high bin speed parts. You run your fab hot, your yields go down, and most likely you end up with parts that are netting out at their true speed.

If you are driving for volume, you will probably run your fab cold, get better yield but lower clocks.

In the first case, because of the fallout (and the fact that you are looking for higher clocks), you will probably have poor overclockers because each of the die is pushed closer to the limits (less headroom). This is regadless of the marked speed.

However, in the second, you could get more headroom because you might have more than your distribution of mid bins and some of that yield can be pushed lower.

But the to all of this is how many parts did you need to yield at what speed from the wafer?

The net of all of that is that you can never assume that you will get better overclocking from lower speeds. It has just as much to do with the recipe (input parameters) as it does with the distribution curves. It is probably true that you have better odds with lower speed, but you might not see as large of a proportional gain. Your mileage may (will) vary.

Processors are snowflakes, proceed accordingly.

He was super busy (with all the forums he was covering) and it had nothing to do with Bulldozer, but he still took the time to write this anyway!

 

[Concillian]

Does anyone know if JFAMD survived the cuts?

The second thing that popped into my head after seeing the layoff headlines was whether or not John Fruehe was affected... The first being whether or not a friend of mine who works there in Colorado was affected.

 

[Idontcare]

^Wasn't Killebrew on the GPU side though? Why fire people from the GPU side? Unless they were going to focus less on performance and more on mobile.

I was referring to the marketing/PR dept layoffs, but I admit/acknowledge that I failed to note that in any way which would have led you you to suspect as much. My bad.

The GPU layoffs make ZERO sense to me. Truly zero, maybe even a negative number of sense. I cannot fathom the reasoning there.

 

[Idontcare]

He was super busy (with all the forums he was covering) and it had nothing to do with Bulldozer, but he still took the time to write this anyway!

Layoffs can be very political, internal office politics I mean. It can be every bit as much of a "who you work for" as it is a "what is your rank" when the chopping block is pulled out of the closet and dusted off.

 

[Ferzerp]

Any time there are a substantial number of people fired, anyone that a company wants to get rid of, but can't find a valid reason to do so usually are gone at the same time. I've seen it before.

 

[nenforcer]

Consequence of squandering the FX name, imo. PR had to have known it was going to be a rocky release early enough to switch to a Phenom III moniker or similar.

 

[wlee15]

Terry Makedon former Manager of the Catalyst team and current Manager of Fusion Software Marketing as well as Andrew Dodd current Manager of the Catalyst team remain with AMD.
https://twitter.com/#!/CatalystMaker/status/132609387901620224

 

[Idontcare]

n/m

 

[primesuspect]

It looks like most of graphics division PR is gone including Bernard and Antal who moved from Europe last year. Do you know about Evan? i haven't seen anything from him on twitter. What about the CPU guys?

i think it is a mistake to lay-off their PR and engineers. Better would have been to start with the senior board.

As far as I know, Evan made it through unscathed.

We published Bernard and Antal's names yesterday. It really sucks that they moved to the US for this job just a year ago, agreed. :-/

 

[apoppin]

As far as I know, Evan made it through unscathed.

We published Bernard and Antal's names yesterday. It really sucks that they moved to the US for this job just a year ago, agreed. :-/

i know Antal did. One of my Tech editor friends in Europe used to work with him over there. i believe Antal filled the PR spot when Evan got promoted.

These guys are really hard workers. i wish them very well and any company that hires them would get great employees. Do you know about the PR guys in the CPU division? Peter or Robert? Hania?

 

[primesuspect]

I just got an email from John Swinimer. He's gone as well

 

[RussianSensation]

yeah AMd pr dept has been terribad since as far back as i can recall. this might actually be a good step for the company

I see that's what most people keep saying. However, didn't AMD's PR/Marketing team succeed in part because many people on our boards, and likely otherwise, still waited for 9 months after SB launched in January 2011 to upgrade? I don't think even Steve Jobs could have marketed Bulldozer well. You can complain about specific use of graphics or commercials or overclocking events that AMD's PR/marketing team staged, but I bet you they had nothing else to show that would put Bulldozer in a good light. I think the problem is they created way too much hype behind Bulldozer that made the flop even worse since many expected it to perform well.

What are you going to do? Come out and say we have worse IPC than Phenom II, worse gaming performance than 2008 Nehalem, higher prices than 2500k? :sneaky: A CPU is a performance device. It's not a consumer device that you can "feel" or "experience" or show off to your friends or admire its construction quality or resale value. Its purchased for these reasons - well-rounded performance, performance per watt, and performance for the price. Bulldozer fails in all 3. How in the world do you successfully market something like that?

They did their best with what imho is the worst CPU since Pentium D. But at least Pentium D wasn't more expensive than Athlon X2.....